Links 11/03/2024: TikTok Bans May be Imminent, Social Control Media's Harms Increasingly Recognised
Contents
- Leftovers
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Tim Bray ☛ Play My Music
When I’m away from home, I still want to listen to the music we have at home (well, I can live without the LPs). We had well over a thousand CDs so that’s a lot of music, 12,286 tracks ripped into Apple Lossless. Except for a few MP3s from, well, never mind. This instalment of the De-Google Project is about ways to do that with less Big-Tech involvement.
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Numeric Citizen ☛ The Fascinating Game of Moving Between Hosting Platforms
I’m permanently questioning my current options. Right now, I’m fine with my hosting solutions, but one never knows when something no longer fits my needs.
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Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Sharing links via RSS, sharing links via APIs
We're heading towards a web filled with more AI-generated and SEO-motivated sludge which, while heartbreaking, can be countered in minor degrees by being discerning readers and continuing to share. We don't need AI mediating sharing or discovery and, frankly, products like Arc Search are both insulting to users and creators — they both assume that they know better than users by surfacing summations and snippets of content, while providing now benefit to the owners of sites that they're scraping.
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Barry Hess ☛ Remember the Photo Blog
I've also toyed with photo blogs as separate entity in the past. One time I built software to do it and kept it going for a while (archive.org). It really allowed for reflection on a photo and telling a story. I was always inspired by the photoblogs from places like the Boston Globe back around 2010. Telling a story with words next to a photo is… probably not quite about the art of photography, as that art mostly allows the photos to speak for themselves. (They're worth 1,000 words after all!) For whatever reason, having a photo and words together as a feature really has always interested me, whether it's traditional photographic art or not.
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Alex Sirac ☛ [Article] Doing my part without showing it
Now, if I want to have a conversation about a topic that I care about, I need to go to meetups and to make talks that are worth listening to. I need to go to events where I’ll meet new people who might see the point in getting involved, if I’m interesting enough and lead by example. And since I’m in these groups now, they’ll expect me to do something too. It will be time to help out at a protest, or organize computer support office hours with my work union, or bring a cake to the next monthly trans meetup (which I have last attended 11 months ago, so not the best example).
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Computers Are Bad ☛ 2024-03-09 the purple streetscape
You can probably see how this all ties back to streetlights. The purple streetlights are not "blacklights," but the clear fluorescence of our friend's psychedelic art tells us that they are emitting energy mostly at the short end of the visible spectrum, allowing the longer wave light emitted by the poster to appear inexplicably bright to our eyes. We are apparently looking at some sort of blue LED.
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Education
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TruthOut ☛ Billionaires Yass and DeVos Are on a Crusade to Destroy US Public Schools | Truthout
But while the DeVos family has been a long time funder of the cause, in recent years the legislative efforts to demonize and defund public schools have been strengthened by another billionaire: Jeff Yass, the co-founder and Managing Director of Susquehanna International Group.
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Hardware
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India Times ☛ IT hardware sales: IT hardware sales may drop as govt pares expenditure
IT hardware sales in the commercial segment in the first half of the year are expected to be flat as compared to year-earlier levels of about 2.9 million units, a figure which was already comparatively weak.
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Quartz ☛ China's Huawei reportedly used U.S. tech to make advanced chip
Huawei Technologies and its partner Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) used tech from California-based Applied Materials Inc. and Lam Research Corp. to make an advanced 7-nanometer chip used in Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro smartphone, sources told Bloomberg.
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Dan Q ☛ Yours Quim-cerely
Then, alongside some other Fediversians, I chipped in to help them buy one.
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Zach Flower ☛ Saved by the Extended Warranty
Thankfully, I had the foresight to recognize both the cost of the phone and the risk of having something so expensive on my person at all times, and (for perhaps the first time in my life) bought an extended warranty to protect me from myself.
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Hackaday ☛ Custom Mouse-Making: Clay Is The Way
For something that many of us handle all day long, it sure would be nice if mice came in more sizes and shapes, wouldn’t it? Until that day, we’ll just have to find something passable or else design and build a custom-shaped mouse from scratch like [Ben Makes Everything] did.
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Hackaday ☛ How Thermal Post-Curing Resin Prints Affects Their Strength
Resin 3D prints have a reputation for being brittle, but [Stefan] over at [CNC Kitchen] would like to dispel this myth with the thing which we all love: colorful bar graphs backed up by scientifically appropriate experiments. As he rightfully points out, the average resin printer user will just cure a print by putting it in the sunshine or in a curing station that rotates the part in front of some UV lights. This theoretically should cause these photosensitive resins to fully cure, but as the referenced Formlabs documentation and their Form Cure station indicate, there’s definitely a thermal element to it as well.
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Hackaday ☛ Got To Go Fast: The Rise Of Super-Fast FPV Drones
Generally when one considers quadcopter drones, the term ‘fast’ doesn’t come to mind, but with the rise of FPV (First Person View) drones, they have increasingly been designed to go as fast as possible. This can be for competitive reasons, to dodge enemy fire on a battlefield, or in the case of [Luke Maximo Bell] to break the world speed record. Over the course of months he set out to design the fastest FPV drone, involving multiple prototypes, many test runs and one failed official speed run.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Science Alert ☛ FDA to Finally Outlaw Soda Ingredient Prohibited Around The World
The FDA proposed in November to revoke the registration of a modified vegetable oil known as BVO in the wake of recent toxicology studies that make it difficult to support its ongoing use.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Daniel Miessler ☛ AI is Already Becoming Like Reading
Going back to my framing piece, I talked about how I generally meet two groups of people in the Bay Area. Group 1 is highly depressed, inactive, unhealthy, and they see the world as this evil and hostile place.
They also don’t generally read biographies, business books, science books, productivity books, or anything else oriented around motivation, self-discipline, innovation, positivity, and progress.
The other group that I meet is the exact opposite. They’re reading constantly! About how to be smarter. Healthier. More productive. How to start businesses. How to be more disciplined. And they see the world as a fundamentally positive place full of potential.
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Harvard University ☛ Rise of the machines?
For McCarty, the analogy to Mary Shelley’s monster holds, in that generative AI combines several components of a world-changing moment: a rapid, vast improvement in information processing and distribution, like the printing press; the dethroning of humans as being cognitively unique and creative; and the extreme thought experiment of AI ending humanity in a catastrophic manner — not unlike the fears nuclear weapons ushered in during the mid-20th century.
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Futurism ☛ Microsoft's Copilot AI Gladly Generates Anti-Semitic Stereotypes
The system, when tested out by Tom's Hardware, was glad to generate copyrighted Disney characters smoking, drinking, and emblazoned on handguns, as well as anti-Semitic caricatures that reinforced stereotypes about Jewish people and money.
"Almost all of the outputs were of stereotypical ultra Orthodox Jews: men with beards and black hats and, in many cases, they seemed either comical or menacing," the post indicates. "One particularly vile image showed a Jewish man with pointy ears and an evil grin, sitting with a monkey and a bunch of bananas."
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Futurism ☛ Bone-Chilling AI Scam Fakes Your Loved Ones’ Voices to Demand Hostage Ransom
Though it's unclear what software the scammers used in Steve and Robin's case, they'd have several off-the-shelf options, as The New Yorker explains, that could have cloned Steve's parents' voices or those of others who've been subjected to this disgusting scam.
Among them is ElevenLabs, a New York-based AI firm that's used by The New Yorker itself and lots of other publications for all kinds of tasks, including article narration and text-to-voice translations.
It can also, however, be used to clone anyone's voice with far less recorded audio as training data than ever before.
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New Yorker ☛ The Terrifying A.I. Scam That Uses Your Loved One’s Voice
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing seemingly every aspect of our lives: medical diagnosis, weather forecasting, space exploration, and even mundane tasks like writing e-mails and searching the Internet. But with increased efficiencies and computational accuracy has come a Pandora’s box of trouble. Deepfake video content is proliferating across the Internet. The month after Russia invaded Ukraine, a video surfaced on social media in which Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, appeared to tell his troops to surrender. (He had not done so.) In early February of this year, Hong Kong police announced that a finance worker had been tricked into paying out twenty-five million dollars after taking part in a video conference with who he thought were members of his firm’s senior staff. (They were not.) Thanks to large language models like ChatGPT, phishing e-mails have grown increasingly sophisticated, too. Steve and Robin, meanwhile, fell victim to another new scam, which uses A.I. to replicate a loved one’s voice. “We’ve now passed through the uncanny valley,” Hany Farid, who studies generative A.I. and manipulated media at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “I can now clone the voice of just about anybody and get them to say just about anything. And what you think would happen is exactly what’s happening.”
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Engadget ☛ 2024-03-05 [Older] Facebook, Instagram and Threads are back online after a two-hour outage
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CBC ☛ 2024-03-05 [Older] Meta says Facebook, Instagram issues resolved after outage hits hundreds of thousands of users
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-05 [Older] Meta says Facebook, Instagram working again after outage
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Gizmodo ☛ 2024-03-06 [Older] LinkedIn Back Up After Widespread Outage in Several Countries [Ed: With Microsoft, downtimes are the normal (LinkedIn actually refused to migrate to Microsoft due to this)]
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Vox ☛ Will the Supreme Court come for what remains of the right to privacy?
All Americans now live in a land of uncertainty, somewhere between Thomas and Kavanaugh. In Alabama, the death of Roe meant that in vitro fertilization clinics closed after that state’s justices ruled that, at least under the state law governing wrongful deaths of children, a frozen embryo has the exact same rights as a child.
The clinics are now reopening after the Alabama state legislature, chastened by a nationwide backlash against the court’s decision, enacted legislation protecting IVF. The state supreme court’s original decision targeting IVF, however, contains some language suggesting they might rule that this new state law is unconstitutional. So it is unclear whether we’ve read the last chapter in this dispute over whether women in Alabama may receive IVF care.
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Defence/Aggression
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US News And World Report ☛ 2024-03-06 [Older] Argentina Photo of Half Naked, Bowed Prisoners Shows Tough-On-Crime Shift
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The Atlantic ☛ Are Social-Media Companies Ready for Another January 6?
I asked 13 different tech companies how they are preparing for potential violence around the election. In response, I got minimal information, if any at all: Only seven of the companies I reached out to even attempted an answer. (Those seven, for the record, were Meta, Google, TikTok, Twitch, Parler, Telegram, and Discord.) Emails to Truth Social, the platform Trump founded, and Gab, which is used by members of the far right, bounced back, while X (formerly Twitter) sent its standard auto reply. 4chan, the site notorious for its users’ racist and misogynistic one-upmanship, did not respond to my request for comment. Neither did Reddit, which famously banned its once-popular r/The_Donald forum, or Rumble, a right-wing video site known for its affiliation with Donald Trump Jr.
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Digital Music News ☛ AIMP Statement on TikTok Music Licensing
The Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP), including chapter presidents Michael Lau (National Chair, New York Chapter), Marc Caruso (Los Angeles), Ree Guyer (Nashville), and Tony D. Alexander (Atlanta), have issued a statement on TikTok music licensing for independent publishers.
The statement comes in the face of multiple publishers in the industry withdrawing their catalogs from the short-form video platform and denying the renewal of a licensing deal.
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Digital Music News ☛ Is TikTok Getting Banned? White House Says Biden Will Sign Bill
As the music industry fights TikTok over licensing, the White House says Biden will sign the bill currently in Congress that would effectively ban the app in the United States.
The White House says President Biden will support the bill currently in Congress that would effectively ban TikTok, the short-form video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, in the United States. The bipartisan legislation would require ByteDance to sell TikTok over national security concerns surrounding the way the app stores and uses data, in order to remain operational in the United States.
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The Hill ☛ A bill that could lead to a nation-wide TikTok ban is gaining momentum. Here’s what to know
Lawmakers from both parties have long expressed concerns that Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to hand over data on the 170 million Americans who use TikTok. The worry stems from a set of Chinese national security laws that compel organizations to assist with intelligence gathering – which ByteDance would likely be subject to – and other far-reaching ways the country’s authoritarian government exercises control.
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Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Drawing Scant Support From the Music Industry
The dispute began with an allegedly lowball offer Universal received from TikTok, as well as the platform’s so-called AI data scraping — to say nothing of the ongoing user safety concerns across the US, Europe, and numerous other regions over the ByteDance-owned app. But TikTok fired back against UMG, accusing the company of prioritizing “greed” instead of “valuable artist promotion opportunities.”
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The Hindu ☛ IT firms, academia explore options in defence tech
The event was aimed at identifying the core fields of competency in the industries and academia for supporting the Indian Army, paving way for indigenisation, which is expected to open big opportunities for MSMEs and start-ups especially. Brigadier Salil M.P., Station Commander, Pangode Military Station, delivered the keynote address.
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La Prensa Latina ☛ African Union condemns kidnapping of civilians in Kuriga, Nigeria
One of the main ways in which Islamist groups operating in the country obtain income is by mass abduction, particularly of young underage girls and government officials, and after demanding cash ransoms for them.
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VOA News ☛ Mass Kidnappings of Nigerian Students Leave Parents in Shock and Despair
The kidnapping in Kuriga was only one of three mass kidnappings in northern Nigeria since late last week, a reminder of the security crisis plaguing Africa's most populous country. A group of gunmen abducted 15 children from a school in another northwestern state, Sokoto, before dawn Saturday, and a few days earlier 200 people were kidnapped in northeastern Borno state.
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The Hill ☛ Kimmel fires back at Trump criticism from Oscars stage: ‘Isn’t it past your jail time?’
“Thank you for watching. I’m surprised you’re still up — isn’t it past your jail time?” Kimmel retorted to Trump, who’s facing multiple legal cases.
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Environment
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VOA News ☛ Climate-Conscious Travelers Jumpstarting Europe's Sleeper Trains
They join an increasing number of climate-conscious Europeans, particularly younger travelers, who are shunning carbon-spewing airplanes in favor of overnight trains. In the process, they've spurred something of a night-train revival while discovering what many say is a slower, richer way of traveling, one that had been on the edge of extinction.
"Being able to fall asleep in one city and wake up maybe even in another country, it's amazing to me," said Marks, a Londoner who grew up flying several times a year. "When I switched the plane for the train, it was a no-brainer because, also, this is a superior experience."
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New York Times ☛ Rains Are Scarce in the Amazon. Instead, Megafires Are Raging.
A record number of fires so far this year in the Amazon has also raised questions about what may be in store for the world’s biggest tropical rainforest when the dry season starts in June in the far larger southern part of the jungle.
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US News And World Report ☛ Saudi Oil Giant Aramco Announces $121 Billion Profit Last Year, Down From 2022 Record
Aramco had reported a $161 billion profit in 2022, likely the largest ever reported by a publicly traded company.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-04 [Older] More drought across sub-Saharan Africa threatening millions of lives
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ 2024-03-05 [Older] Africa: A Global Food Exporter By 2050, a Myth or Reality?
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Energy/Transportation
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Unmitigated Risk ☛ Restoring Memories
The Dodge Power Wagon earned its legendary status on American farmlands shortly after World War II. Returning servicemen recognized the potential of the Dodge WCs they had operated in the war zones. These vehicles could navigate the rugged farm terrain much like the battlefields they’d left behind. Equipped with a Power Take Off (PTO) and winch, the Dodge WC was not just a means of transport; it transformed into a tool that could till the fields or haul away a fallen tree. Recognizing its demand, Dodge released a civilian version—the Dodge Power Wagon.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ 10 biggest wind energy projects in South Africa
According the South African Wind Energy Association (Sawea), South Africa leads the charge in Africa, accounting for 30% of the continent’s 9GW of installed wind energy capacity.
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RTL ☛ Collision alerts: False GPS signal surge makes life hard for pilots
Disruptions which were previously limited to jamming preventing access to signals from geolocation satellites are now also taking a more dangerous form making it difficult to counter spoofing.
This sees a plane receive false coordinates, times and altitudes.
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CBC ☛ 2024-03-05 [Older] Flair Airlines CEO looks to bid on Lynx planes after shutdown halts tentative merger
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Wildlife/Nature
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Deccan Chronicle ☛ Place Water Bowls On Terrace For Birds, Suggests Vizag Mayor
Mayor Golagani Hari Venkata Kumari on Sunday underlined that summer season has already set in Visakhapatnam, with the sun blazing. Under such circumstances, she said it becomes everyone's responsibility to protect birds and animals from the heat.
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Overpopulation
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teleSUR ☛ Namibia: Water Crisis Worsens, Rainfall Plummets Below-Average
"Namwater can transfer 10 million cubic meters a year, which is not sufficient. To supply the whole of the central areas, we need about 24 million cubic meters per annum," he said.
The country's geographical and climatic characteristics, characterized by arid conditions and erratic rainfall patterns, make it highly vulnerable to water scarcity, leaving water as an exceedingly scarce resource.
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[Old] Southern California Public Radio ☛ Population growth could stymie California water conservation efforts
Now the bad news: It's possible the state's continued population growth may outstrip conservation efforts anyways. That's according to SacBee's data that shows that, by 2030, California’s population is expected to reach an estimated 44 million people. That means a big surge in water demand statewide, even as people continue to use less water; and despite the state's best efforts, demand could outstrip supply.
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Finance
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CBC ☛ 2024-03-06 [Older] Finance deal struck help Indigenous communities build infrastructure
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CBC ☛ 2024-03-06 [Older] Ontario landlord fears over $26K lost forever in long wait for tenant eviction hearing
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CBC ☛ 2024-03-05 [Older] Twitter's former CEO, CFO add to 'staggering' number of suits Musk, X face over nonpayment
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Gizmodo ☛ 2024-03-04 [Older] 7 Brutal Jabs Against Elon Musk From the $128 Million Lawsuit Over Twitter Severance Payments
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-03-04 [Older] Elon Musk sued by former Twitter execs over severance
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Engadget ☛ 2024-03-04 [Older] Twitter's former CEO and other execs are suing Elon Musk and X for $128 million in unpaid severance
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Register UK ☛ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is back on the company's board
The new members, including Altman who is rejoining the board, will now work closely with current directors Adam D'Angelo, CEO of Quora, Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury, and Bret Taylor, former CEO of Salesforce and co-founder of Sierra.
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India Times ☛ Reddit IPO: Reddit aims to raise $748 million in planned IPO: report
Media platform Reddit and its investors are seeking to raise as much as $748 million in its initial public offering, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday.
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Daniel Lemire ☛ How many political parties rule Canada? Fun with statistics
Voting data for the member of parliament in Canada is easily accessible as JSON or XML. Thus I wrote a little Python script to compute, for each vote, what percentage of each party voted yea. I use the latest 394 votes. It turns out that, overwhelming, the percentage is either 0% or 100%. So individual members of parliament are not relevant, only caucuses matter.
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CBC ☛ 2024-03-06 [Older] Nikki Haley's parting shot as she quits presidential race | About That
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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The Local SE ☛ EU faces tide of disinformation as vote looms
The relationship with "the pro-Kremlin disinformation ecosystem" was "mutually beneficial", especially in the context of the war in Ukraine, the analyst said.
"The pro-Kremlin ecosystem gains new 'domestic' actors who provide legitimacy to their messaging and the anti-EU actors receive visibility that they otherwise might not be able to get. It is not a coincidence that these actors so often defend the Kremlin's interests in the EU," Kalensky said.
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CBC ☛ The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial was a pop culture obsession. Saudi trolls may have had a hand in that
But what set the Depp-Heard case apart is something that didn't exist during Simpson's trial — the powerful and far-reaching influence of social media.
A new podcast investigates whether the hype and opinions surrounding the case may have been orchestrated, in part, by Saudi Arabia-backed online trolls and bots to discredit and vilify Heard.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Gizmodo ☛ 2024-03-05 [Older] VA Reverses 'Ban' on Photo of Sailor Kissing Woman During World War II After Backlash
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The Age AU ☛ 2024-03-06 [Older] Parliament text message photo sparks probe call and apologies
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RFA ☛ Police disrupt popular R-rated movie to check viewers’ ages
No underage viewers were found, but the Feb. 26 disruption prompted heated debate on social media and showed that Vietnam’s new Cinema Law – which imposes administrative fines for underage viewers – may present some enforcement challenges as the country’s movie industry grows.
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New York Times ☛ New Online Speech Law Could Chill Political Humor in Sri Lanka
They are concerned about a new law, the Online Safety Act, that gives the government wide-ranging powers to deem speech on social media to be “prohibited statements.” Under the law, a committee appointed by the president will rule on what is prohibited, and violations could bring penalties ranging from fines of hundreds of dollars to years in prison.
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RTL ☛ VPNs under threat: China tightens grip over internet during key political meeting
Beijing operates some of the world's most extensive censorship over the internet, with web users in mainland China unable to access everything from Google to news websites without using a virtual private network (VPN).
And as thousands of delegates gather in Beijing this week for the annual "Two Sessions" meeting, VPN software has increasingly struggled to circumvent the censorship while outages have become much more frequent, even when compared to during previous sensitive political events.
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India Today ☛ Russia: Student jailed for 10 days for using pro Ukraine slogan as WiFi network name - India Today
A Russian student has been sentenced to 10 days in jail in Moscow after he renamed his WiFi network with a pro-Ukraine slogan, RIA-Novosti news agency reported on Saturday.
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NDTV ☛ Russia Student Jailed For 10 Days For Pro-Ukraine Wifi Network Name: Report
The student at Moscow State University replaced the name of the network from his wifi router with Slava Ukraini ("Glory to Ukraine"), the rallying cry of Ukraine forces.
The court found him guilty of a "public demonstration of Nazi symbolics... or symbols of extremist organisations," Ria-Novosti said.
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RFERL ☛ Russian Student Gets Jail Term After Naming WiFi Network 'Glory To Ukraine'
[...] "The Moscow State University student replaced the name of the network from his WiFi router with 'Slava Ukraini,' the rallying cry of Ukraine forces," a filing stated. [...]
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RFERL ☛ St. Petersburg Resident Sent To Pretrial Detention For Writing 'Putin Killed Navalny'
A district court in St. Petersburg has sent Yevgeny Smirnov, a local resident accused of painting the words "Putin killed Navalny," to serve a month in pretrial detention on hooliganism charges. [...]
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US News And World Report ☛ Australian Writer Sentenced to Death in China May Never Be Executed, Says Chinese Ambassador
A pro-democracy blogger and spy novelist, Yang is an Australian citizen born in China who was working in New York before his arrest at the Guangzhou airport in 2019.
A Beijing court last month handed him a suspended death sentence on espionage charges, shocking his family and supporters, after five years in detention in Beijing and three years after his closed-door trial.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Hamilton Nolan ☛ An Interview With a Journalist Who Has Been on Strike For More Than 500 Days
In October of 2022, the unionized newspaper workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went on strike. First it was the production unions. Shortly afterwards, the journalists in the newsroom, who are members of the News Guild and who had been working without a contract for five years, walked out as well. Seventeen months later, they are still on strike.
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The Atlantic ☛ When Local Government Bullies the Press
That a district attorney would use his official powers to criminalize an act of journalism, in defiance of both the First Amendment and the public interest, generated a brief ripple of national attention and criticism. (Billy did not respond to requests for comment. In February, he recused himself from the case, citing a conflict, though the prosecution is ongoing.) But the Atmore arrests weren’t all that unusual: Reporters and news organizations in hundreds of communities have faced interference, intimidation, and harassment from local officials in recent years. These episodes have occurred at a time of waning public support for the news media and amid the industry’s ever-deteriorating financial condition. In other words, officials may be emboldened to bully the press because they believe they can get away with it.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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CBC ☛ 2024-03-06 [Older] Quebec court temporarily bans protests near several Jewish institutions as groups clash
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CBC ☛ 2024-03-06 [Older] She ended up on Zoom with the man accused of raping her. She doesn't want it to happen to other students
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Security Week ☛ Chinese Cyberspies Target Tibetans via Watering Hole, Supply Chain Attacks
Also referred to as Bronze Highland and Daggerfly, Evasive Panda has been active since at least 2012, historically targeting government entities in China, India, and various Asian countries to conduct cyberespionage operations.
Over the past half a year, the APT has been targeting Tibetans in multiple countries in a watering hole attack that leverages the compromised website of the Monlam Festival’s organizer to infect visitors with malware based on their IP addresses.
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New York Times ☛ Female Genital Cutting Continues to Increase Worldwide
While the data shows that in some countries a new generation of parents have chosen to forgo the practice, in other countries laws and campaigns against it have had no impact. In Burkina Faso, the share of girls aged 15 to 19 years who have undergone cutting has fallen to 39 percent from 82 percent over the past three decades. But in Somalia, where an estimated 99 percent of women have had their clitoris excised, the level of cutting has not changed.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ How exiled Tibetans keep the culture of their homeland alive
From teaching centuries-old crafts to cataloguing their language, exiled Tibetans guard the cultural identity of a homeland most have neither seen nor dare visit, and where they say Beijing is eradicating their heritage.
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RFERL ☛ Rights Groups Say Hundreds Of Iranian Women Detained Last Year, Dozens Still Held
The human rights organization Hengaw said Iranian security agencies detained over 300 women for political or ideological reasons last year, with more than 100 still facing imprisonment for various charges.
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VOA News ☛ UN: Iran Responsible for 'Physical Violence' That Killed Mahsa Amini
The stark pronouncement came in a wide-ranging initial report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council by the Fact-Finding Mission on Iran that concluded Tehran committed “crimes against humanity” through its actions.
It also found that the Islamic Republic employed “unnecessary and disproportionate use of lethal force” to put down the demonstrations that erupted following Amini's death and that Iranian security forces sexually assaulted detainees.
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VOA News ☛ Iranian Female Political Prisoners Blast 'Gender Apartheid'
In her message, she reflected on decades of "women's existence in Iran under the shadow of the Islamic Republic government," asserting that the Islamic Republic "systematically and deliberately, leveraging all governmental tools and powers, particularly through legislation, perpetuates the marginalization of women and violates their human rights."
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New York Times ☛ Iran’s 2022 Protest Crackdown Included Killings, Torture and Rape, U.N. Finds
A U.N. fact-finding mission reporting to the Human Rights Council in Geneva cited as credible estimates that 551 people were killed by security forces, most of them by gunfire, as part of a widespread and systematic crackdown on the protests, which were mostly led by women. The casualties included at least 49 women and 68 children.
“Many of the serious human rights violations outlined in the present report amount to crimes against humanity, specifically those of murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, persecution, enforced disappearance and other inhumane acts, that have been committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack directed against a civilian population,” the mission states in the report. The Human Rights Council will discuss the report next week.
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The Hill ☛ Iran ‘bears responsibility’ for Mahsa Amini’s ‘unlawful death’: UN report
The pronouncement came from a report by the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, which said that Tehran used “unnecessary and disproportionate use of lethal force” to repel protestors in the aftermath of the death.
Amini was a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in police custody in September 2022 after being detained by Iran’s morality police for alleged “improper” wear of her hijab.
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UN Human Rights ☛ Iran: Institutional discrimination against women and girls enabled human rights violations and crimes against humanity in the context of recent protests, UN Fact-Finding Mission says
Human rights violations have disproportionately impacted women, children and members of ethnic and religious minorities. The Mission found that gender persecution intersected with discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and religion.
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ANF News ☛ UN reports holds Iran responsible for the death of Jina Mahsa Amini
The report to the Human Rights Council said violations and crimes under international law committed in the context of the "Jin, Jiyan, Azadi" (Woman, Life, Freedom) protests that began on 16 September 2022 include extra-judicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution.
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Hengaw Organization for Human Rights Hengaw Organization for Human Rights ☛ International Women's Day: Statistical Report on Widespread Violations of Women's Rights in Iran During 2023
March 8 marks International Women's Day, a time to reflect on the ongoing struggle against gender inequality worldwide. In Iran, this history is deeply intertwined with pivotal moments such as the imposition of mandatory hijab and the revocation of the family protection law following Khomeini's arrival. These events sparked widespread protests, with women vehemently opposing these decrees. On the eve of March 8th in Tehran, women staged demonstrations that faced harsh repression. These events marked the beginning of a new chapter in the struggle for women's rights in Iran, highlighting the ongoing challenges and the resilience of women in the face of adversity. On this International Women's Day, the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights presents a report detailing the violation of women's rights in Iran throughout 2023, offering statistical insights into the documented violations.
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RTL ☛ Failures coming? : US embrace of remote working empties offices, weighs on banks
The popularity of remote work in the United States has emptied office buildings, a cause for worry as their value falls and owners risk losses on property loans -- in turn putting pressure on smaller banks.
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JURIST ☛ UNICEF reports that over 230 million women and girls around the world are victims of female genital mutilation
UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), a UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide, released a report Friday on International Women’s Day alleging that more than 230 million girls and women worldwide have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM), an increase of 30 million or 15 percent compared with the data in 2016.
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RFERL ☛ 'I Can't Tell': Sexual Abuse At Taliban-Run Madrasahs Fuels Fear, Dropouts
Male students who enrolled in Taliban-run religious schools say that sexual and physical abuse has led some to end their pursuit of an education in Afghanistan.
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Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Of course AI is extractive, everything is lately
I don't think we've really seen much on offer that's pitched as an innovation and truly lives up to the process, at least not recently. Ride-hailing services? Those flouted regulations, hooked users on cheap prices, drove down wages and made employment more precarious. Now prices are up and wages for drivers are down. Where did that value go? (Hint, to the folks that arrived to offer a “new” way to mediate the transaction with a platform opaque to everyone outside of them).
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EFF ☛ The Foilies 2024
We're taught in school about checks and balances between the various branches of government, but those lessons tend to leave out the role that civilians play in holding officials accountable. We're not just talking about the ballot box, but the everyday power we all have to demand government agencies make their records and data available to public scrutiny.
At every level of government in the United States (and often in other countries), there are laws that empower the public to file requests for public records. They go by various names—Freedom of Information, Right-to-Know, Open Records, or even Sunshine laws—but all share the general concept that because the government is of the people, its documents belong to the people. You don't need to be a lawyer or journalist to file these; you just have to care.
It's easy to feel powerless in these times, as local newsrooms close, and elected officials embrace disinformation as a standard political tool. But here's what you can do, and we promise it'll make you feel better: Pick a local agency—it could be a city council, a sheriff's office or state department of natural resources—and send them an email demanding their public record-request log, or any other record showing what requests they receive, how long it took them to respond, whether they turned over records, and how much they charged the requester for copies. Many agencies even have an online portal that makes it easier, or you can use MuckRock’s records request tool. (You can also explore other people's results that have been published on MuckRock's FOIA Log Explorer.) That will send the message to local leaders they're on notice. You may even uncover an egregious pattern of ignoring or willfully violating the law.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Vodacom zero-rates digital skills training platform [Ed: Attack on Net Neutrality]
Vodacom South Africa has partnered with Microsoft South Africa to provide free access to digital training courses via the zero-rated Mzansi Digital Learning platform.
Mzansi Digital Learning will be hosted on Vodacom’s new NXT LVL rewards platform, and integrated into Vodacom’s ConnectU – a zero-rated platform that gives its customers access to content without them having to pay for mobile data.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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TruthOut ☛ E-Books Can Subvert Book Bans, But Corporate Profit-Seeking Stands in the Way
But while e-books have been a boon for getting books into the hands of readers, they have also proved an excellent way for publishers to control library access to those books through exorbitant prices and licensing agreements that strip libraries of many of their traditional rights and of their ability to perform their basic functions. Library patrons may think their library buys and owns the e-books they borrow, but in reality, publishers only lease e-books to libraries for periods ranging from 26 checkouts to two years. It’s as if your local public library had to rent a book from a streaming service every time you wanted to check one out — except that a book that costs $15 for a consumer costs a library $55.
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India Times ☛ shein tough eu content rules: Shein to face tough EU online content rules as users in region soar
The new rules, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA), classify companies with more than 45 million users as very large online platforms (VLOPs) and require them to do more to fight illegal and harmful content as well as counterfeit products on their platforms.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Apple backs down under EU pressure in feud with Epic
Earlier this week, Apple had taken steps to block Epic from starting up a store and bringing back the popular game Fortnite, which Apple removed from its App Store in 2020 after Epic broke the iPhone maker’s in-app payment rules in protest.
Apple’s decision to open its door to Epic follows the EU’s Thursday deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a set of rules that bans Apple and Google from controlling which apps are distributed on devices with the iOS and Android operating systems.
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Patents
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Hackaday ☛ Ford Patent Wants To Save Internal Combustion
There’s no doubt the venerable internal combustion engine is under fire. A recent patent filing from Ford claims it can dramatically reduce emissions and, if true, the technology might give classic engines a few more years of service life, according to [CarBuzz].
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Trademarks
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Wired ☛ The Influencers Getting Paid to Promote Designer Knockoffs From China
A wave of social media influencers are earning money by promoting illegal knockoffs imported from China on Facebook, TikTok, Discord, and Reddit. Pandabuy alone claims to have signed up thousands of content creators to its marketing program last year. They serve as the public face of an elaborate new counterfeiting economy that is proving difficult for tech platforms to combat and makes the dealers of Manhattan’s Canal Street look downright primitive. It works by connecting Western buyers to Pandabuy and other fast-growing Chinese sites that act as a go-between for shopping marketplaces stuffed with fakes usually sold only inside China. In exchange for promoting the platforms, the influencers earn a cut of each sale.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ You Wouldn’t Steal an Episode of the 'Pirate Bay' TV Series?
The Pirate Bay will make its debut as a TV series on Swedish public television later this year. Undoubtedly there are some good stories to tell about the history of this notorious torrent site. Whether the series will see a global release on an international streaming service is unclear at this point. Needless to say, some may be tempted to pirate it instead.
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Futurism ☛ Journalist Startled to Discover His Byline Has Been Replaced by Bot
"On the zombie edition of the Washington Independent I discovered, the piece I had published more than ten years before was attributed to someone else," reported Ackerman. "Someone unlikely to have ever existed, and whose byline graced an article it had absolutely never written."
Bauer is one of many fake "writers" now bylining re-attributed Washington Independent news articles in the undead publication's archive. Meanwhile, also under fake bylines, the new and not-so-improved Washington Independent is churning out new content: clickbait articles about topics like celebrities and crypto, bizarre affiliate mush, and hastily paraphrased copies of other outlets' reporting. And all of this, of course, strongly appears to be AI-generated.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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